Blood On Your Hands
by BelovedSlayer
Summary: After sending Angel to hell, Buffy confronts his alter ego in her dreams, but instead of wanting revenge, he provides some closure for her guilt. Part I.


Title: Blood On Your Hands

TV Show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Author: Beloved Slayer

Rating: T

Summary: After sending Angel to hell, Buffy confronts his alter ego in her dreams, but instead of wanting revenge, he strangely attempts to provide her some closure for her guilt. Part I.

Author's Notes: Angelus in this one shot may act a bit out of character. This story revolves on a more reflective approach for Buffy. It takes place almost a month after the events of Becoming, Part II. I'm not exactly sure what prompted me to write this, but the urge to do so wouldn't go away so I had to write it down, And I had wanted to write a one shot that involved Angelus. Just a warning in that this ficlet might not make a lot of sense. All feedback and reviews are greatly appreciated and encouraged. Enjoy.

Chapter One

In the dream, it was past the stroke of midnight, and the paleness of the moon reflected on two figures that were strutting carefully through an abandoned cemetery.

"Where are we?" she promptly asked.

"In your dream. Where else would we be, Slayer? You're the one with the prophetic dreams after all. Not the One with the Angelic Face that you've come to love. I'm just a innocent vampire here," he retorted with a slight smirk, standing alongside her with his hands deep in his pockets, his skin a delicate pale blossom that illuminated under the soft silver light of the full moon, his vampire visage fully displayed on his face as he licked his fangs in an absent motion.

It gave him a mysterious, alluring aura as thick billows of smoke enveloped their shadowed bodies, hovering above the moist blades of flattened grass while withered tombstones and dilapidated mausoleums aligned on both sides of the disheveled pathway before them.

"Give me a break. What I really would like to know is why the hell you're in my dream? You don't belong here. Haven't been for almost a month as far as I can remember," she snarled, her hazel eyes glittering with a dangerous fury that was obscured by the darkness surrounding them.

"C'mon lover, haven't you been reading up on dreams? You need to improve on your studying. You're slacking off. I might be the amazingly awesome Angelus in your mind, but I'm not like the one you're familiar with in your real life. I'm practically harmless. And I mean that in the sincerest way possible. No harm, no foul. Gentle as a kitten."

"I seriously doubt that. But even so, I'll ask again: Why is your sorry ass here? Why am _I _here?" Buffy quipped, continuing to drink in her newfound surroundings and his unwelcome appearance with obvious disdain.

"Because I'm here to serve a purpose: To help you grieve and to move on with your loss," Angelus remarked with a single eyebrow raised, no traces of amusement written in his unforeseen eyes.

"What loss?"

"Oh, you know damn well who I'm taking about. Angel. C'mon, Buff, don't tell me that you don't think about him every night; that you don't feel the hurt, the pain, the immense guilt that eats at your conscious at that moment when you sent him to hell. Tell me you don't still feel any of that. I know _you_. I know it's still killing you on the inside, and that it never lets up no matter how hard you try to pretend that everything is hunky dory. You still cry every night for him, and no one knows about your pain except for you. I know you still mourn for him. You were mourning before I made my arrival here. I can smell the fresh tears you're desperately trying to wipe away from me."

"How would you know? You don't know how I feel. You don't know what it's like to have to force yourself to kill someone you love out of duty," Buffy angrily chirped, her eyes focusing on a single gravestone near the corner of a small path that led to a ominous forest.

She sensed him approaching her from behind, keeping a relatively safe distance between them as her back tensed in a stiff response.

"Of course I wouldn't. I'm soulless after all. But I was in his mind while he was being tortured out of his misery in that hell dimension. Everything he felt, I felt it too. The guilt of everything he had done throughout the centuries, I had felt it too. I couldn't stand it. I felt his love for you, his anguish cries in wanting you to free him from his hell. It made me want to gag a few times, but it's the truth. I don't have to take some pathetic fool's life to know how he feels about you. He and I are the same being after all. We share the same body and face. That was before I left his body so I could find a way to visit you in the dream, to bring you back to the light again, to find a way to save him somehow," Angelus spat, quickening his stride as he realized he was losing his invulnerability to the only human who had the ability to make him feel human.

Buffy couldn't decide whether or not to take his confession seriously. She was only half listening.

"I'm here, and he's still in that dimension being tortured for God knows how long since I sent him there, and it's all my fault. What if I never see him again?" she muttered, trying to suppress a tear from building in her eye, a lump developing in her throat as she clasped a hand over her mouth, her body heaving over the tombstone.

"Are you gonna go all weepy on me? You're the Slayer, for hell's sakes. I didn't come here to see you cry for him like some broken doll. That's not who you are. I'm here to help you deal with him being gone. You have to come to terms with it. The world still needs you, Slayer. _He_ still needs you. Even if your heart is telling you to run away from your problems, it won't help you save your boyfriend."

Buffy continued to ignore him, closing her eyes to the night. "I don't want to be here. I don't want to see what my dream wants to show me. I don't want to see anything that might remind me of _him, because it still hurts so damn much whenever I see his face in my mind._ I'm here, and I'm scared as hell that I might see a grave with his name on it, and that my dream will tell me that he's gone forever; out of my reach, that I can't save him. That he's dead because of me. I can't be the Slayer if he's not in my life anymore," she pressed on with a frantic cry, blond eyebrows knitting together in distress.

"That's the reason why you're here, Slayer; you confronting this and accepting that you're not at fault here. You can't afford to break down, not when everyone is counting on you. Angel wouldn't want that, would he? He would want for you to continue fighting, because that's what you are. A warrior. Like he was. Or, is. I can't believe I'm actually saying this crap, but you have to believe that." Angelus' voice became more intensified as he shifted his focus to stand beside his enemy, and his mate.

Even if he didn't want to admit it, she was his, as was Angel's. And right now, he desperately needed her.

Buffy remained silent. Moments later, she sensed him standing by her left side, taking her small hand into his cold one, both sets of fingers intertwined. "What are you doing?" she demanded, her eyes avoiding to glance at him. She hadn't noticed that they were now standing at a fresh mausoleum.

"Giving you something that you're in desperate need of. Comfort, and strength," Angelus replied moodily under his breath. Moments later, the Slayer fell into an impenetrable void, her mind completely blank.

Sunlight was streaming through the closed blinds, dust motes streaming in the dank air of her bedroom. Suddenly, swiftly, she tossed the comforter aside, rising to her elbows in beads of sweat protruding on her forehead, tendrils of blond hair damp against her skin. But a fierce set of grim determination could be seen on her face, rather than the feeling of remorse she had expected to appear on her expression.

Somehow, she would find a way to save Angel.

A/N: Will there be a possible sequel? Who knows...


End file.
